North Carolina no longer a Full Democracy.

The right wing authoritarian movement is now in full bloom with the election of Trump. And what better way to prove that then with this eye opening look at North Carolina's grossly manipulated elections.

Republicans own this. This is their vision of fair elections. But does it really give voters confidence in their elections? This is going on across the country, and it's getting worse every year:

Andrew Reynolds and Danish colleague Jorgen Elklit, designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.

Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place ... I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

Point by point...

1. In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. 

2. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank ... only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.


3. Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. 

4. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

That North Carolina can no longer call its elections democratic is shocking enough, but our democratic decline goes beyond what happens at election time. The most respected measures of democracy — Freedom House, POLITY and the Varieties of Democracy project — all assess the degree to which the exercise of power depends on the will of the people: That is, governance is not arbitrary, it follows established rules and is based on popular legitimacy.

The extent to which North Carolina now breaches these principles means our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html#storylink=cpy

If Conservative Leaning Rural Polling Places Favor Republicans, should we get rid of them?

Here we go again. First, Republicans pissed and moaned about the mythical voter fraud problem. Then they complained that early voting hours were unfair to rural voters. Now Trump their candidate for president said the whole electoral system is rigged.

Does it look like Republicans are trying their hardest to turn people off to the whole idea of voting?

Insane New Test and Hoop to Jump Through: Does a voting site provide an advantage to the Democratic Party. JS:

Green Bay city clerk Kris Teske didn't want to allow early voting at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in part because she believed it would give Democrats an advantage, records made public Tuesday reveal … she asked state elections regulators in August if she could prevent making the university an early voting site in the face of requests from state Rep. Eric Genrich (D-Green Bay).

Teske became suspicious of the request because a Democrat asked for the early voting site. The Nation-Ari Berman:

The insane part of Teske’s statement begs the question; would a voting site in a heavily conservative rural area also give Republicans an advantage, and shouldn’t that site be closed down as well? Don't think for one moment this excuse won't come up again and again.

And since the city is run by corrupt Mayor Jim Schmitt, guilty of election fraud…

Schmitt agreed to plead guilty to three misdemeanor charges related to accepting illegal campaign donations and falsifying information on his campaign finance reports.

…this incredibly convenient decision was made:

At the time, Green Bay officials said that a time limit prevented them from establishing a satellite voting site … the chief of staff to Green Bay Mayor said Teske was simply trying to properly respond to a judge's ruling that allowed more early voting locations without providing criteria for where they should be located. 

U.S. District Court Judge James Peterson in July struck down limits on early voting that were approved by Gov. Scott Walker and GOP lawmakers:

“The court finds that the legislature specifically targeted large municipalities—Milwaukee in particular—intending to curtail minority voting,” wrote Federal District Court Judge James Peterson, who said Republicans were “suppressing the votes of reliably Democratic minority voters.”

Republicans immediately gamed the judges request. That was fast.

Teske also cited concerns about keeping ballots secure and the cost of opening a satellite voting site.

Because as we all know, voting in some areas gets too expensive to justify in a representative democracy.

Students from across the political spectrum in September asked Teske to allow early voting on campus.

When (April 5 primary) polls closed at 8 pm, there were still 150 students waiting to vote. “Some people described it as chaos,” reported Ellery McCardle of the local ABC affiliate. “People were standing shoulder to shoulder, there was absolutely no room to move around in here.”

Voter Suppression Cancer Spreads to Federal Government...

Is there really an effort to suppress voting in the U.S.? Of course.

As I’ve written before, voter suppression laws attack constituents on both ides of the aisle, but it impacts typically dense urban areas that vote Democratic the most. That's worth a few less rural GOP voters. 

Scheme to Suppress Votes!!! Thanks to open records requests, the curtain has been pulled away, and Republicans can no longer deny it.   

What happened: 

AP: An email provided to AP through open records requests offers a glimpse into the mindset of Brian Newby, executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who decided — without public comment or approval from bosses — that residents of Alabama, Kansas and Georgia can no longer register to vote using a national form without providing proof of U.S. citizenship.

The Problem, it's legal, resulting in a lawsuit: 

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states must accept and use the federal voter registration form, and an appeals court ruled in 2014 in a lawsuit filed by Kansas' Republican Secretary of State Kobach that states could not force the commission to require residents to provide proof-of-citizenship documents on the national form.

The Courts Don't Matter. So Kobach managed to see one of his guys, Newby, into the federal agency via fellow Republican commissioners. Way to work the system:

1. As a finalist for the job of executive director, Newby said in a June email to his benefactor, Kris Kobach, that he was friends with two of the commissioners at the federal agency, and told Kobach: "I think I would enter the job empowered to lead the way I want to. I wanted you in the loop," Newby emailed Kobach.

2. Kobach said he spoke to one, and possibly two of the Republican commissioners, about Newby prior to his hiring. "I told that person I thought Newby would be excellent and he was one of Kansas' most talented county election officers.

Kobach Lied: Newby wasn't just under investigation, it turned out he fraudulently spent taxpayer money and threw a "conference" for the Republican commissioners who hired him: 

3. But documents from open records requests show that as early as April 2015 ... Kobach met with county officials to discuss concerns about Newby's job performance ... Those concerns led officials to call for an audit of the Johnson County election office Newby led.

4.The audit found Newby intentionally skirted oversight of government credit card expenses, wasted taxpayer funds and improperly claimed mileage and travel expenses while at his former job in Kansas. Newby has called the audit inaccurate and misleading.

5. Among the questionable expenditures was more than $18,000 that county taxpayers spent for a conference in Kansas City ... it was organized by Newby and all three federal commissioners spoke at that conference, which was in September while Newby was under consideration for the job.

Big Surprise, Republican Election Suppression Tactics Backfiring on them!!

A new regulation asking for both a signature and a printed name is resulting into a whole lot of dropped names on nomination forms. Turns out, most people don’t print their names out any better than their signature. Who knew? GOP election suppression zealots, that's who.

The lawmakers responsible now want a more lax enforcement of their own rule, kind of like making up as you go. Remember how Republicans insisted on the immediate enforcement of voter suppression laws? Now that it's affecting Republicans, we're being asked to forget the letter of the law, and violate the intent for political reasons.

Chippewa: The Republican chairwoman of the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee, Rep. Kathleen Bernier, R-Chippewa Falls, chastised the state elections agency Tuesday for its strict application of a new law requiring printed names on candidate nomination forms. “I am disappointed as a colleague of the GAB that they would go this far. Bernier said she would ask the GAB at its next meeting to stop staff from determining what is and isn't printed and to instead determine what is readable ... Rep. Jim Ott, R-Mequon, the author of the law, said it was meant to ensure the names of people who signed those documents are legible.

That's not what the law says. And, people don’t print any better than they write.

GAB spokesman Reid Magney said “Our interpretation is that to qualify, a name must be both printed and legible. Cursive handwriting, no matter how legible, is not printed.”

Weird, but those are the rules, and Republicans are getting hit:

Barry Nelson, a Manitowoc Republican running for an open state Senate seat, initially turned in 470 signatures, but after review saw the number knocked down to 369, below the 400 minimum for state Senate candidates. A GAB staff member told him many of the names were stricken because of an illegibly printed name. “He said if they looked too squiggly that could be construed as an extra signature and not a printed name,” Nelson said. “If you can make out your name, who cares if it’s squiggly?”

Craig Krueger, a 20-year-old college senior from Hilbert, filed 237 nomination signatures Monday. But about a half-hour before the deadline, a GAB official told him that all of his signatures were invalid and he was off the fall ballot.